


Frog Eggs

by Ranni



Category: Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: And developing some new ones, Angst, Blood and Injury, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Bruce Banner Is a Good Bro, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Germophobia, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt/Comfort, POV Tony Stark, Phobias, Protective Tony Stark, Ranni needs a hug, Sick Clint Barton, Sick Tony Stark, Sickfic, Team as Family, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, confronting fears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 21:00:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14756225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranni/pseuds/Ranni
Summary: The jet crashed but it shouldn’t be a big deal—they’re okay, and the team should be arriving any minute to rescue them. But then it’s suddenly not okay, and Tony has to face numerous deep-seated fears simultaneously.--or—There’s something terrible waiting in the water.





	Frog Eggs

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys! "Infinity War" was awesome, huh? My son and I loved it. I did try to pull a Steve Rogers and cover his ears during some of the language, but it turns out he's heard all those words already from school. *shrugs*
> 
> Now THIS story...well, it doesn't have anything to do with "Infinity War".

*

“You’re gonna catch leprosy from that water,” Tony warns, watching Clint peel off clothes carefully, not wanting to get them wet again when they’ve only just started drying. “And there’s probably leeches. No, there’s _certainly_ leeches. You’re gonna be covered in leeches when you come out.”

Clint ignores his warning completely, folding his pants with a pointless fastidiousness, laying them down on a nearby rock. “You don’t need to go in. I can probably hold my breath longer, anyway.”

Tony scoffs, because Clint think he’s more afraid of the water than the leeches, which are _gross._ He’s also more than a little ashamed that it’s true and of his gratitude that Clint understands, that he won’t ask him to come in the lake with him. That he won’t mock him for it afterward. They’ve been friends a long while now, and while they tease each other mercilessly, there are lines that are never crossed, never even discussed.

Tony never mention the wide burn marks that crisscross the tops of Clint’s thighs, unhappy mementos of long ago torture.

Clint won’t ask Tony to go into the water.

“You don’t know that,” Tony insists immediately, because saving face is always important, especially when it’s all he has. “We haven’t had any breath-holding contests that _I_ remember. Maybe I’m a better swimmer than you are. Maybe your swimming skills are _shit_ compared to mine, Hawkeye.”

Clint grins and shrugs affably enough, eyes moving away from Tony to focus on the water, where the crashed jet lays waiting. In their instinctive haste to escape they had neglected to grab any emergency supplies, and now the jet is collapsed over them, no more likely to give them up than a greedy Gollum.

“Maybe we don’t need them,” he says uneasily, not wanting this to happen, not wanting Clint to disappear into unknown depths, to fumble around in the dark for a supply crate that quite possibly didn’t even survive the impact. “JARVIS will tell the team we went down. It won’t take long for them to start looking.”

“They’re still fighting.” Clint folds forward into a deep stretch, pressing his palms to the ground before raising back up to roll his shoulders. “It could be awhile before they come looking.” _If they’re even alive_ , he doesn’t say; their shared worry for the others is another thing that goes carefully unspoken. Concern for friends fighting without their aid, struggling against a too-strong enemy that already broke the Iron Man suit and took down a jet. “If we’re going to be waiting a day or two I’d rather do it with the help of emergency supplies that are literally right there in front of us.”

“ _Down_ there,” Tony corrects, and Clint shrugs again, unconcerned with semantics.

A tent, matches, water purification tablets—Tony wants those things too, but not nearly as much as does _not_ want Clint to dive back into wreckage they’ve only just escaped. He can imagine all too clearly his friend losing direction in the darkness, trapped inside the wreckage, hammering his fists against windows and walls as his lungs fill with water.

“Maybe—” he starts to say, but Clint’s already wading out, the dark water swallowing him up nearly up to his waist, covering those burn marks he can’t talk about, before he turns back toward Tony.

“It’s gonna be okay. I’ll be right back.”

Tony rolls his eyes with a nonchalance he absolutely does not feel. “Oh _great_. Now you’re creeping into ‘last words’ territory. You’re just _begging_ to die.”

Clint laughs, and then disappears noiselessly.

Tony watches him go under the water and sits down hard on a nearby rock, wondering how deep the lake goes, how far down the jet is. It had seemed to take forever to swim up from it as it sank like a stone, struggling toward the sunlight, barely visible through the murk. He’ll have enough nightmare fuel from that experience alone; a friend’s subsequent death would be the cherry on top of a shit sundae.

*

He counts slowly, because the perception of time can be a slippery thing, and only a careful accounting of it will tell him the correct moment to panic—anything before that is wasted energy. He scrubs a hand along his face. It smells like the rest of him, like lake water, earthy and fishy. Water that never flows anywhere, just sits quiet and harbors life that is born and dies all under the same still surface, an alien system right here on earth.

The count reaches sixty and Tony can’t sit any longer, springs to his feet to pace uneasily along the water’s edge. He’s tempted to toss a rock into the depths in an attempt to call Clint back, a wordless plea to give up on the idea of tents and matches and bandages. They don’t need those things. Not really.

What they actually need is breathable air, and Tony has too much out here and Clint not enough down there, and the count is past one hundred now.

“Come on,” Tony mutters. “Come _on_ , you asshole.”

At a hundred and fifty he’s stopped counting and is debating whether to dive in himself when there’s a small splash, followed by a louder one as Clint reappears, whooping in big, desperate breaths that bring in as much water as they do air.

He’s surfaced quite a distance away, perhaps disoriented by the water after all, and Tony plunges in immediately, crossing the distance easily on a wave of adrenaline and relief. Clint’s hand darts forward to twist into Tony’s shirt as he takes another gulping breath, choking again as he struggles to keep his head above water and a grip on the box he’s got wedged under his other arm. He slips almost all the way under the water again, the weight too much combined with obvious fatigue.

“Leave it!” Tony shouts, pulling him back up and readjusting his grip around Clint’s chest—the man is so _slippery_ somehow—trying to avoid tangling their kicking feet.

“No. Fucking. Way.” Clint is gasping too much to be very compelling, but dredges up reserves from the willful energy he operates on and forces himself to relax, trusting Tony to move them both slowly back toward shore.

When they finally reach dry land, Tony drags himself up to walk on his knees, pulling an almost boneless Clint Barton behind him, the emergency kit bringing up the rear, dragging a deep groove into the dirt.

“You…stupid…bastard,” Tony swears as Clint rolls over to throw up shocking amounts of lake water. Tony grabs him under the shoulders and pulls him away from the mess before he passes out into it.  Blood wells up from multiple abrasions along the archer’s back and arms, mixing with water to drip down in weak pink streams.  “You could’ve drowned, and for what?? A book of fucking _matches_? A knife? That was dumb, Clint, so incredibly dumb.”

“Yeah. Well.”

Clint doesn’t have the energy for anything more, and neither does Tony. They lay with their faces to the sky, breathless in the sunshine.

*

“Ooh, a magnesium flare,” Clint coos. “Those are _nice._ They work underwater,” he adds, ignoring Tony's withering glare.

Then, a few moments later, “Oh, these are good, too. Four hundred calories apiece, and they kind of taste like super-dry cookie dough.”

Clint has rifled through endless boxes of survival gear during his career at SHIELD, but now greets each object he pulls out of the box with all the excitement of a kid at Christmas, attempting to bridge the angry silence, to draw Tony back into conversation. Clint holds up a package of water purification tablets, shakes them meaningfully in Tony’s direction. “ _Now_ we’re talking. That water was like licking the inside of a fish tank.  A _dirty_ fish tank.”

Tony raises an eyebrow, and Clint shrugs doubtfully. “Or…it was like drinking the bilge water of a submarine in the middle of a dysentery outbreak?” he offers instead, beaming when Tony can’t help a grudging laugh.

“Okay, now you’re just being nasty.” Tony snatches the purification tablets out of Clint’s hand, squinting at the printed directions. “I don’t care how good you think these are; we’re boiling everything, too. That lake is full of fish shit and—” he gestures vaguely “—frog eggs or something.”

“Mmm, sounds like one those delicacies that rich people go on about.”  

*

Clint starts a fire and sets up the tent while Tony boils the hell out of the water, but only the grim determination to avoid dehydration makes him force himself to drink any, gagging at the fishiness behind the stronger chemical taste. There’s nothing in the box of wonders to combat the mosquitoes that come to feast upon them, the two men slapping them away, until they concede defeat and take refuge in the tent.

It supposedly holds three men, but _that’s_ a joke, because it’s uncomfortably small for the two of them to fold into, and neither of them are especially big men as it is. They struggle around to find comfortable positions before worming awkwardly into sleeping bags and settling into what Tony has always considered the “angry couple after an argument” configuration, their backs to one another.

When the unpleasant crinkling of the tarp floor finally quiets from their movements, Tony becomes hyper aware of Clint’s breathing. It’s probably a totally normal volume but sounds overly loud in such a confined space.

“Are you doing that on purpose?” Tony asks finally. “You sound like Darth Vader with pneumonia.”

“Mmm.”

“I hate tents,” Tony tries instead.

“Mmmhmm.” Clint is somehow almost asleep.

“I hate ‘outside’, too.  And lakes.  And jets that crash into lakes.”

“Mmm.”

It’s rapidly becoming too hot in the tent, and the sleeping bag that seemed so insubstantial twenty minutes ago suddenly feels stifling and restrictive. Tony imagines their mingled breath rising to hit the canvas ceiling and, unable to escape, forming into condensation to rain their own germs back down on them. His stomach does an uneasy flip at the thought, elbows Clint sharply in irritation at his ability to fall asleep, but the impact is so diminished by the cushion of two sleeping bags that the archer doesn’t even notice. The tarp beneath them gives a plasticky squeal with the movement.

Anticipating a barrage of nightmares, Tony only allows himself to doze fitfully, drifting off and jerking awake until his body aches. He finally gives up and goes to sit outside, marveling at a night sky unsullied by light pollution, listening to the sounds of birds and bugs he has no names for. Some larger animal moves through the trees, snapping sticks under its feet.

*

Clint’s half undressed when Tony comes back with more firewood, and he stops short, free hand raised in warning. “If this is some kind of sexual overture, just know that I’m _very_ flattered, but—”

“Could you look at my back?” Clint interrupts impatiently.  “Something is—it feels like it’s on fucking fire.”

As little as Tony enjoys seeing other people’s wounds he does so now, almost disappointed when the injury in question is little more than a long scrape up Barton’s lower back. The skin around it appears puffy and vaguely sunburned. “It’s infected.”

“Oh, you _think_?” Clint rolls his eyes before craning his head back as far as possible, trying to see for himself, hissing in discomfort. “God, it hurts.”

Tony digs through the first aid kit, pulling out several wrapped packages of anti-bacterial wipes. “Maybe you got fish or frog eggs in it and now you’re gestating. Kind of like a low-rent, freshwater Swamp Thing.”

“You’re hilarious,” Clint mutters, trying not flinch as Tony swipes at the area. “Mother _fucker_!”

“Sorry,” Tony says, glad Clint can’t see the wound, which has somehow widened further under his ministrations and is bleeding sluggishly again. “Got to get all the bug larvae cleaned out.”

“What’s with—” Clint groans against clenched teeth, his hands fisted, a overexaggerated reaction to such a small wound, Tony thinks “—you and eggs?”

“Tiny living things are, as a rule, gross,” Tony says matter-of-factly, tossing the last bloody wipe onto a substantial pile. He pulls on a pair of rubber gloves; he likes Clint Barton just fine, but no way he’s putting antibiotic ointment on someone else’s bloody wound without protection, friend or not. Clint groans at his probing fingers. “Stop being such a baby, Hawkeye. Jesus.”

Clint looks up, searching the sky, his fists clenched. “The others are gonna show up today. You just wait and see.”

*

But he’s wrong, and a few hours later they’re in trouble.

 _Big_ trouble—way worse than crash landings and dramatic watery interludes. Clint’s back has turned a fiery red and he’s not just feverish; he’s a pale, shivering mess, slumped into Tony in an attempt to find any sort of relief, the way he would never allow himself if he had any awareness at all.

“Where the _hell_ are they?” Tony whispers furiously, running a wet gauze square over the side of Clint’s neck in a futile attempt to lower his temperature. It’s impossible that the infection could have come on so quickly, that it could be burning him up already from such a minor wound. Tony catches up the fingers scrabbling for his, squeezes them in a pointless attempt at caretaking. He watches the lake, the setting sun glinting merrily off the surface. He thinks it should be pretty, but it looks sinister somehow, as if tempting him to come in and drown. Inviting him to come meet the creatures it harbors, whatever bacteria that crept inside his friend and liked what it found there, deciding to stay and multiply.

“I’m sick,” Clint moans for the hundredth time, and Tony grits his teeth in helpless frustration. “I think—Tony, I think I’m getting sick.”

“I know. I'm here; I’ve got you.”

The jet is probably beyond help, but the Iron Man suit is still in there somewhere. It’s too broken to fly, but all it needs is to work just a little bit. Tony built it from nothing, and he can surely coax it back to life—all he needs a spark of power. Just a little bit of luck for JARVIS to find them, to tell the others that they aren’t okay, that they can’t wait, that they need to be found _now_.

For that to happen, Tony has to go in the water.

But he can’t go in the water.

Tony grips Clint tighter and shuts his eyes against the sparkling surface of the lake, red spots still dancing against his eyelids. _It’s getting too dark_ , he tells himself, trying to pretend it’s all about practicalities and not about the chest-crushing terror at the thought of slipping under the dark water and into a world of greens and browns. The sunlight had barely pierced through the last few feet when they escaped the sinking jet; it had all been so dark and it was only because of the rising bubbles that Tony could tell down from up, following them to the surface. The jet had crashed in the middle of the afternoon—he doesn’t want imagine how much darker it would all be now, with night rapidly approaching.

He’ll go tomorrow. In the morning he’ll swim down, just like Clint did, and find the suit, drag it back up the surface. Or maybe the others will come before then, Natasha flying the other jet, the others aboard, all alive and unharmed. Bruce will know exactly what to do, and they’ll be cleaned up and flooded with medicines and everything will be fine again. Tony keeps his eyes screwed shut tightly, imagines himself in a clean white room, smelling of disinfectant and industrial soap, imagines Clint sulking in a hospital bed instead of whimpering on the ground.

*

When the mosquitoes start attacking in earnest he wrestles Clint back into the tiny tent and seals them in, both on top of the sleep bags this time, the heat from Clint’s fever quickly bringing the small space to an almost unbearable temperature. The vents near the top do little to help, the humid air outside being no cooler.

“Frog eggs,” Clint slurs, vowel sounds too long, the consonants half swallowed. “Grow…nnnn…bein’ all _gross_.”

“Shhh.” Tony pats at his shoulder carefully. “Shhh. I’m sorry.”

He’s not sure exactly what he’s sorry for—for all of it maybe. Sorry for making a shoddy jet with engines that fail when fired upon. Sorry for being semi-phobic about water, for not retrieving the emergency supplies himself. Sorry for planting the whole egg idea in Clint’s head, sorry that it’s causing him distress now, when he’s already suffering. Sorry that he can’t do anything but wait for rescue and for morning, dreading his own impending attempt at their salvation.

“Like a game of telephone,” Clint mutters out of nowhere, and Tony pats him again, having nothing else to offer. “Right, Tony? Right?”

“That’s right.”

*

He has no memory of falling asleep, or even being tired, but it must have happened because his eyes snap open. Tony feels hot and cold at the same time, and his back is soaking wet, all the way from his shoulders down to the top of his pants. “What the—?”

He plucks his shirt away from his skin. It’s soaked through, and so are the sleeping bags and Clint. For a brief moment Tony holds out a fool’s hope that they’re just covered in sweat, but life has never, ever that easy.

“Clint. Wake up. You’ve had an...uh...an accident.”

He rolls over and sits up, put his hands on Clint’s sides to pull him upright, until reality comes to a screeching stop as Tony’s left thumb keeps moving forward while the others are stopped by skin and bone, sliding into something wet and spongy. A place with _give,_ where there should be none.

“Um. Oh, crap. Oh no.” He lowers Clint back down, hands paused over the dark, sodden shirt, suddenly terrified of what he’s going to find underneath.

“Clint. Wake up.”

It doesn’t come out loud enough, his voice an insubstantial whisper. He grasps the hem of Clint’s shirt and pulls it up carefully. It sticks a bit, dragging against—Tony blinks, suddenly realizing he might have lost a little time there. The wound that started off as a shallow scrape and morphed into an infected cut is now gaping wide, dark crimson and dripping pus and some sort of clear liquid that’s soaked the sleeping bags and both of their clothes.

“Fuck!” Tony releases the shirt and it hits back against Clint’s skin with a wet slurping sound. “Fuckfuck _fuck!”_

Tony scrubs his hands furiously down his pants, attempting to wipe away God knows what in a ridiculous and futile gesture. This wound is beyond him, beyond their tiny first aid kit, probably even beyond hopstials. It’s the kind of wound that people die from, the kind doctors photograph for textbooks and journal articles. The kind of wound that fuels scare headlines in magazines to end water enthusiasts’ fun, at least until they forget all about it— _Flesh Eating Bacteria Kills Avenger. “I never saw it coming,” Iron Man Claims._

Tony scrambles out of the tent, and strips off his shirt with a cry of horror, tossing it soddenly away. He scrubs his hands along his pants, and it’s a joke, because they’re as contaminated as the rest of him, and there’s nowhere to change that, nothing to wash with, no way to get away from body fluids and dirty lake water. Tony thinks of frog eggs and flesh sliding away from bone and vomits copiously into the nearest pile of green, again and again until his stomach is just a clenched ball of pain. He starts to cover his face with his hands, thinks of the germs lurking there and the way they can never be clean, not here, not like this, and wrenches them away to hang helplessly at his sides.  

“God. _God_.” He’s not praying, exactly, always too questioning and doubtful for faith, but making an appeal to anyone or anything that might be listening. _I could use a little help, here. I could use a lot of help._

He forces himself back to the tent, just hovering in the entrance, not daring to go any further, not wanting to see. Clint hasn’t moved at all, but his chest rises and falls with obvious effort. Tony has seen enough of death to know it can be a long and painful business.

Tony positions himself to face the east, waiting for the sun to come up, waiting for the chance to fix this.

*

 _You’ll drown. Clint almost did, and he’s the stronger swimmer._ It’s Dad’s voice—every scolding voice inside Tony’s head has his father’s voice, the bearer of all the bad news he doesn’t want to hear.

“I can make it,” Tony says aloud, willing it to sound true. He strips off his pants slowly, his movements mechanical and deliberate. They can’t provide him any protection from microorganisms. There’s no need to be wet and uncomfortable later.

 _It’s stupid for you to go in there_ , another voice chimes in. This one is all his, the selfish Tony that is only concerned with survival at any cost, the part of him that would jettison everything and anyone in a heartbeat if it meant he could live. _Clint’s already dying. Even if you get the suit and call for help, he’ll probably still die. Going into water you know is dangerous is nothing a protracted suicide to save someone that won’t make it anyway._

“You’re going to be alright, Clint,” Tony calls stubbornly in the direction of the tent.  He hasn’t gone back in to see if Clint is alive in there. He doesn’t _want_ to know. He hates that voice and that part of himself, hates what Captain America would call selfishness, what the Black Widow would shrug and call pragmatism, self-preservation.

“I’m doing it,” Tony insists. “Because he’s my friend. Because it might work. Because he didn’t ask me to go in before. Because he wouldn’t want me to now.”

Maybe it’s stupid to be so afraid. He’s already been in the lake twice and come out lucky—the first time the jet crashed, again when he charged in to pull Clint out. He’s not going anywhere he hasn’t already been, not risking anything that hasn’t already happened. He’s also drunk lake water for two days, and no amount of water purification will ever be enough to convince him that the bacteria didn’t survive, that they aren’t swimming around inside his body right now.

 _You’re gonna die down there,_ Dad warns again.

“Probably,” Tony agrees, and strips off his last sock slowly, until there’s nothing left to take off, no other way to delay.

*

He takes the magnesium flares from the emergency kit, holding them too tightly as he wades into the water. Something blunt knocks into his leg—probably a fish—disappearing quickly as Tony flinches bodily away. His feet shift into the muddy ground, and he wishes he’d worn shoes after all, his soles nicked by sharp rocks inside the sediment. He bites off his groan of horror, because it’s too late now; the same microorganism killing his friend is probably burrowing its way into his body this very moment, looking for a place to take root, ready to multiply and eat and eat and eat.

“Too late,” Tony says, because it always was, from the moment they crashed it was too late, their death warrants signed at that moment. Any luck now will have to be of his own making.

He swims out to where he’s pretty sure the jet lays waiting before striking the first flare, glowing and spitting sparks a harsh red, and takes a gulping breath before slipping beneath the water.

*

The sunlight disappears from view quickly, and it’s like trying to see through a pool of chocolate milk, nothing much visible past the length of his arm, even with the illumination of the flare. He doesn’t do anything but focus on sinking straight down, until his feet hit the smooth surface of the jet, possibly a wing. Lungs already burning uncomfortably he angles downward to fumble with blind, groping hands, looking for a sizable way in and out. He’s skating the edge of pure panic when his fingers skim the jagged tear in the fuselage that they escaped through, and he drops the flare there and makes immediately for the surface and a world full of air.

He comes up sputtering and shaking from relief and adrenaline, glancing at the water beneath his kicking feet, just able to make out the flare burning below. He’ll be able to make the second trip more quickly, with more time and air to find the Iron Man suit, glad he secured it in the hold instead of tossing it in the back, angry that it dared to break. He treads water for a minute more, not wanting to go back into that world of brown silence, but knowing every minute he delays only makes him more tired, reduces his chances of coming out again.

He strikes the second flare, eyes shifting toward the shore and the blue tent, then takes another gulping breath and risks it all.

*

“I’m. Never swimming. Again.” He gasps raggedly between the words, dragging the suit up the shore, so like much hauling Clint out of the water only two days ago, and he never wants to relive this moment again, doesn’t want to remember it anywhere but his nightmares. “I retire. People can make fun. And I. Won’t give a shit.”

He lays breathing against the ground, the dirt pressed to his face probably the cleanest thing he’s touched all day, hardly able to comprehend the fact that he made it. That he found the suit and didn’t drown—Dad’s mocking voice and Tony’s selfish one both quiet in his head, probably just as shocked. He swam blindly in a pool of plague water and doomed himself to a grisly death, and it’s all for nothing if the gamble doesn’t pay off, if the suit won’t revive. If the team doesn’t come in time.

He lays the suit out in the sun, fighting the impulse to fold the hands under the chestplate like a corpse.  He removes the helmet and isn’t terribly surprised when he slips it on and it stays dark, just another broken thing pulled out of the lake.

“JARVIS,” he tries, and there’s nothing, but he catches a weak illumination from the chestpiece out of the corner of his eye, not much more than a flicker. “JARVIS, I can’t hear you; can you hear me?” The light flares again, a little stronger than before, blinking twice, and the world suddenly slots back into place, wild hope rushing to fill back in that void of horror that accompanied Clint’s illness. “Tell the team to come find us _now_. Right now. Tell them that we’re dying. Tell them to bring medical supplies and prepare themselves to see some pretty gruesome shit. If they can’t come, then call what’s left of SHIELD. Call Rhodey. Call anyone you need to, JARVIS, but get someone here.”

The twinned blinks come again and Tony removes the helmet to lay it down above the suit, carefully reuniting head with body. Now there’s nothing to do but wait, and watch the sky.

*

He goes back to the tent, steeling himself for what he will see, surprised to find it is Clint’s open eyes.

“The team’s coming,” he says quietly, curling his fingers around Clint’s. They are hot and slick with sweat, but hardly the worst thing Tony has come into contact with in the last few hours.

Perspective can be a hell of a thing.

Clint is beyond answering, but his eyes stay fixed on Tony, who sits half in and out of the tent, eyes on the sky and a hand on his friend. He tells the story of swimming down to the jet, leaving out the raw panic and including a fanciful interlude with a mermaid, watching as the sun moves higher and higher. From there he tells about his ill-fated matchmaking attempt between Rhodey and Pepper, which ended with both angry at him but friends with each other. The sun has reached its zenith and is starting a slow slide down again by the time he spins a yarn about flying kites with his father—really just a cribbed version of the last scene of _Mary Poppins—_ when he sees it.

Another jet streaking toward them, beautifully functional, salvation on silver wings.

*

Tony is in a hospital bed, just like he dreamed, sheets white and pristine and starched to hell. He inspects his forearm carefully, glaring at the discolored tear, what they tell him was the beginning of his own infection, its progress halted by an IV of blessed antibiotics. He glances at the dangling bag, willing it to drip faster and cleanse his blood. He brings his arm up to his face and inhales deeply, trying to catch any lingering scent of the water and only smelling hospital soap, reassuring in its bland, unidentifiable fragrance.

“Tony,” Bruce scolds, then sighs and holds out his hand until Tony drops his arm reluctantly into it.

“Does that spot look bigger to you?” He knows he’s asked too many times, but after having half his fingers buried in Clint Barton’s back he feels like he’s entitled to a little angsty repetition. “Darker? _Squishier_?”

“No,” Bruce says firmly, picking a pen off a nearby clipboard. He draws a blue circle around the edges of the wound, careful not to press hard, releases Tony’s arm for him to admire. “Now you’ll be able to see for yourself. You can watch it get smaller instead of bigger. You’ll see it’s okay.”

“You’re brilliant. You should be a doctor. Or a scientist. Or a superhero.” He grins at Bruce, who shakes his head in weary affection before smiling back. “How’s Clint doing?” He’s asked that question too many times as well.

“Better; Dr. Cho is working her magic and trying not to be too excited about the challenge. It may not look pretty, but that’s not really so bad, considering the alternative.”

Maybe it’ll be another scar that Hawkeye won’t talk about, like the burns across his legs. Or, knowing Clint, he might brag about it endlessly and show it off at every opportunity, working in every adjective he knows and making liberal use of the words _pus_ and _rot_ and _exposed bone._ Neither response would surprise Tony much.

“I’m not swimming ever again,” he tells Bruce, who nods.

“Understandable.”

“I think I’ll drain the pool and fill it with trampolines. That would be better. That would be fun.” He checks the spot on his arm. It looks the same.

“It would.”

Tony drops his arm and narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Shouldn’t you be encouraging me to get back on the horse? Face my fears? Control them before they control me?”

Bruce shrugs. “I think that ‘not swimming’ is a perfectly reasonable reaction to several very traumatic experiences. And people don’t need to swim to be happy.”

“ _Thank_ you!” Tony declares, glad someone finally appears to get it. “I’m thinking that I’ll never camp again, either.”

“Camping is the worst,” Bruce agrees. “I’ll ‘never camp again’ right alongside you.”

“And I’m only drinking water that’s been tripled filtered by man-made means. Any company that claims their water comes from a mountain spring is getting some serious side-eye from yours truly.”

“ _Also_ okay.” Bruce pulls Tony’s arm away from where it’s crept close to his nose again. “Why don’t you try to sleep for a bit? I’ll stay with you.” He nods towards the blue circle. “Keep an eye on things.”

Tony scowls, hates that his anxiety is so transparent, but also glad, _again_ , that someone sees and understands. That it won’t be used to twist the knife, make him feel ashamed. He drags the blanket—so clean, everything is clean—up to his chest as Bruce turns off most of the lights.

“I would pull you out of the water, Bruce.” His eyes are already closing, too many sleepless days catching up to him at last. “If I had to. If I had to save you, I would do it. Even if I didn’t want to.”

“I know,” Bruce says, and settles in to keep watch.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent my teenage years living next to a lake that was beautiful from above and a disgusting, murky fish-fest from below. There was also an old town at the bottom (it's a man-made lake) and once a fisherman caught a boot with a human foot inside. I still swam in there despite all this; Missouri summers are hot as hell.


End file.
